Most But Not All the Blame

On Tuesday, The Atlantic published an excellent article (link here) titled "This Isn’t All Trump’s Fault (But He Isn’t Helping Either)" and the secondary title of "Even with perfect leadership, the pandemic was always going to be bad. But the president has caused the crisis to be far worse."

In part of the piece, the article authors compare the United States flat-footed response to the crisis to that of South Korea, which has done a superb job. They argue that South Korea's numbers per capita would be lower than the US for several reasons, but I disagree because they fail to take this into consideration: that Asian country's population has almost six times the density of the United States, meaning people live and work much closer together, this making infection far easier.

If we apply South Korea's testing, diagnosis, treatment, and social containment ratios to the United States, that means potentially we would be at about 63,000 infections in the US with under 1,100 deaths. In Trump's America, the infection rate as of this writing is 215,000 and the death rate is more than 5,100.

Therefore, Trump has made the problem four times as bad as it could have been with capable, visionary leadership.